


A Day at the End of the World

by cywscross



Category: Original Work
Genre: Alternate Universe - Post-Apocalypse, Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, Gen, Post-Apocalypse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-05
Updated: 2016-10-05
Packaged: 2018-08-19 18:19:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,809
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8220475
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cywscross/pseuds/cywscross
Summary: Don't stop.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Read my mess.

 

It’s raining. Which isn’t anything new, but soggy shoes are never fun, and it takes forever to dry off if your clothes get wet. Danika doesn't have an umbrella so she just picks up her pace when the ongoing drizzle starts turning into a downpour.

She rounds a corner and a breath of relief escapes her upon spying the familiar sight of an orange school bus abandoned on one end of the parking lot. Some part of her is always kind of afraid that one day, the bus might just be _gone_ , for one reason or another. It's a mostly irrational fear, one she tries not to think about. She hurries across the lot towards the bus, more than eager to get out of the rain. The door’s folding open for her before she reaches it even though they worked out a specific knock months ago.

“You're late,” Chris accuses her even as he takes the two backpacks she came back with so her hands are free to shed her coat.

“I was held up,” Danika mumbles from behind worn fabric as she pulls her slightly damp sweater over her head as well. “Two guys in the supermarket. They never even saw me. I just waited them out.”

Chris’ expression goes all pinched and shuttered by the end of her explanation, and anyone else would've mistaken it for disapproval, but Danika knows better. Knows fear and concern when she sees it these days.

“Hey, I'm fine,” She tells him, and not for the first time either. They’ve gone through this song and dance more than once, but it’s a bit of routine for them, a reassurance in and of itself, and they’re in short supply of that already.

“Could’ve been scavengers,” Chris mutters darkly as he sits down and starts sorting through the supplies Danika managed to swipe this time.

“They were talking, with words,” She retorts, probably too flippantly if the flat, unimpressed look she gets is anything to go by. She huffs but ducks her head and reaches for the other bag once she’s settled herself as close to the portable heater as physically possible. Chris is good with his hands, and winter’s coming up fast - they’re going to need the heat.

They say no more on the subject. Danika came back alive, Chris was alive and waiting for her, and those two things are about as much as either of them can hope for nowadays.

A clatter makes her look up, only to find Chris grinning a bit crookedly at her and holding up a box of smarties. “Haven’t had these in a while.”

Danika smiles back. “Yeah, I couldn’t believe it either. There should be two more packs in there.”

They go back to digging. Mostly, it’s non-perishable foods and whatever clothes Danika managed to scrounge from the half-looted, abandoned stores she could reach without too much risk. A new tube of toothpaste and a mug that says ‘THE WORLD MAY END BUT COFFEE IS FOREVER’ also found their way into the bags. The latter actually prompts a bark of laughter out of Chris, and it gets a place on one of the makeshift shelves nailed to the wall. Once they’ve put everything away, silence falls, and they end up listening to the howl of the wind battering against the windows. The storm’s really picking up, and it sounds like it’s going to be a bad one.

“We’re gonna need parts for another heater,” Chris murmurs, first to break the comfortable hush between them. Inwardly, Danika wonders how many hardware stores she’s going to have to raid. Outwardly, she just nods and asks for a shopping list. Chris doesn’t look too happy but he’s learned not to apologize for it.

Danika glances around. Almost everything is handmade, held together by desperation and Chris’ half a degree in engineering, but it’s not bad. Home used to be carpeted floors and cushy sofas, a polished kitchen and the clink of crystal, a feather-soft bed and more clothes than she knew what to do with. Parents. Siblings. Then the major cities around the globe were all hit at the same time, and now they live out of a bus, gutted of its seats and renovated to accommodate the two of them. Danika still doesn’t know the hows or whos or whys of how this all started, maybe it was even an accident. But no matter the reason, it doesn’t make one whit of difference to the fact that the world’s a living nightmare now and only getting worse.

A socked foot pokes her leg. “Princess?”

Danika wrinkles her nose. Chris smirks but it’s a tight thing on his face. “Don’t go getting lost in your head then.”

Yeah, she did that, at the beginning. Shock, or something, when the ground underneath her high school literally collapsed beneath their feet sometime between checking Facebook and finding out Washington was just _gone_. A lot of kids died that day. Her own sister was crushed by the ceiling right in front of her. And Chris’ brother was killed somewhere in that mess too. Danika didn’t know him, for all that they were in the same grade, but Chris was there to pick him up from school that afternoon. Neither of them knows what happened to the rest of their families. And they certainly didn’t know each other when Chris crashed into her that day amidst the screams and panic and falling debris and then proceeded to grab her and hightail them both out of there.

She’s never asked why, and Chris has never offered a reason. But he was still around when she finally snapped out of her funk a week into the apocalypse, in this very bus too, except his leg was broken, and they were both dirty and tired and hungry, with a granola bar left between them.

The leg never set right. Chris can walk but not far. It’s why Danika does the supply runs.

“ _Dani_ ,” Chris says again, and this time his voice comes out clipped, not quite angry, just worried. Always worried. She suspects it’s just as much out of genuine care as it is the fact that if one of them goes, there won’t be much left for the other, in both the emotional sense and the practical. Danika doesn’t know how to maintain the upkeep of ninety percent of the appliances in their bus. And Chris would never survive a run-in with a group of scavengers if he ventured out for food and bumped into them. At this point, they need each other a lot more than Danika ever thought she would ever need anyone or anything.

“Dinner?” She offers, both to take her mind off more depressing thoughts and so that Chris stops looking at her like he’s contemplating giving her a good shake.

Chris eyes her suspiciously for a moment before grunting his agreement, shifting to take some of the weight off his bad leg. Then he freezes and his head swings to the nearest window. “Did you hear that?”

Danika instantly goes motionless as well. Even her hands stop halfway to the cupboard where the instant noodles are stored as she strains her ears for anything remotely out of the ordinary. There’s rain, there’s wind, there’s the rattle of the seats out back where they piled them after unscrewing them from the bus floor.

And then there’s a thump. And another, and another. Danika feels the blood drain from her face. Chris doesn’t look any better. Barely breathing, Danika scrambles to her knees and peers out the window, praying she doesn’t see what she knows she’ll see anyway.

Dead eyes stare straight back at her, and she almost screams. Then Chris is there, clamping a hand over her mouth and dragging her back down and out of sight.

“It looked at me!” Danika hisses, terrified. “Chris, it _looked_ at me!”

“Shut up,” Chris whispers back. “Scavengers can’t see. They hunt by hearing. We tested that. And it can’t hear us through a wall of metal. We tested that too.”

But it’s clear he’s already doubting, and a second later, something slams against the side of the bus with a rattling screech, one of the windows shatters and sprays glass all over the both of them, and this time Danika really does scream even as she reaches for the closest hard object – Chris’ crutch – and swings it hard enough to cave part of the scavenger’s head in. Its eyes roll grotesquely in its melted skull, and it loses its grip on the bus, but only for a moment before it lunges right back through again, rotting fingers clutching at the space between them, mouth gaping open with another chilling shriek, and before Danika can pull back, one of its hand closes around her arm in a vice grip and yanks her towards its mouth.

She swings the crutch again, but there isn’t enough room to wield it properly, and for a heart-stopping moment, she’s certain this is how she’s going to die.

And then Chris is there, bringing a butcher knife down on the scavenger’s wrist with brutal efficiency. Danika falls back, trips, and collapses on her ass, choking on tears even as she rips the rotted hand from her arm and flings it away from her, but she still looks up in time to see a flash of orange from Chris’ other hand, and then the scavenger outside is going up in a billow of roaring flames. Chris doesn’t bother watching. He’s at her side instead in a heartbeat.

“Dani? Are you alright?”

She thinks she might shake right out of her skin. That was the closest call either of them have had since it all began. But she makes herself nod, makes herself stand, and she doesn’t need to look at Chris to know what they have to do now.

“We can’t stay here anymore,” He tells her anyway, and that’s a blow to both of them because they’ve been safe here for _months_. This was more or less home.

But Danika just nods again. Nods once more after that and then moves to pack as much as she can as quickly as possible. More scavengers will come soon. If they stay, they’ll die.

Behind her, Chris starts stashing things into a bag as well.

“Who knew even the undead could adapt?” He murmurs with a dark sense of humour. “You learn something new every day.”

Danika snorts weakly. Outside, the rain douses the flames. The scavenger doesn’t get up again.

It was always just a matter of time, she thinks. It’s the apocalypse – nowhere is really _safe_. But even with this development, it’s still the end of the world, and they’re still alive.

They’ll survive. That’s all they can ever really do.

She turns, shouldering her bag. “Let’s go.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> I feel like I am physically incapable of writing anything without overtones of Steter.


End file.
